If the $300 steakhouse dinner is dead — and in this era of stripped-down dining, I say at least it’s on life support — George Friedmann doesn’t want to hear about it.

Friedmann persists in selling big cuts of expensive, aged and fatty meat at Prime, the steakhouse in his Windsor Arms Hotel. When chef Jean-Pierre Challet, a former employee, recently came a-courtin’ with the idea of turning Prime into a bistro (something very much of the times), Friedmann balked.

So Challet’s proposed ICI Bistro is unlikely to happen at the hotel. Instead, Challet has taken on the role of “guest executive chef,” and tweaked Prime’s menu. The so-called modern steakhouse now serves a $115 Kobe strip loin at one end of the price spectrum and a $10 morsel of filet at the other.

(The waiter talks us out of the $10 filet. “It’s really just a mouthful, two ounces. You’ll be disappointed,” he says, steering us to the eight-ounce, $40 version.)

But nobody, not even a businessman on a free-pass expense account, wants to pay $115 for a steak that’s overcooked and over-sauced. In fact, all the beef at Prime — graded AAA, wet-aged for 40 days and cooked under a 1800F Montague broiler — is mistreated this way. It’s not so much a modern steakhouse as a waste of perfectly good animal flesh, and our dollars.

First impressions, however, are favourable. The welcome is smooth, the service charming. Charles Pachter’s paintings are witty and the Rat Pack booths are plush. Fellow diners range from jeans-clad tourists to ladies in Chanel nibbling on Kobe sliders to businessmen chewing over decanters of Amarone.

The leather-bound menu — hefty in the best steakhouse tradition — hints at the disappointments to come. Classics are unnecessarily updated. Does a wedge of iceberg lettuce ($15) really need dried cranberries and sultanas? Not when it’s short on blue cheese. Is mixing Jack Daniels into cocktail sauce supposed to drown out the pong of a $36 shrimp cocktail? It doesn’t. And why park a fist-size lump of quivering pork belly on Caesar salad ($11)? Bacon works just fine.

Let me state for the record that I am a steak purist: I like my beef seared, salted and peppered. Full stop. No sauce, no garnish, no sputtering pats of butter.

However, Prime complicates the issue with fussy garnishes like fried quail eggs and wispy thyme sprigs. Drowning a $115 steak in oversalted Bordelaise sauce is an insult. So is cooking it past request: medium-rare repeatedly comes as medium, medium comes as medium-well.

Prime is the rare steakhouse where vegetables and starches come on the same plate as the meat, sometimes on top of it. Goat cheese ravioli add little to a 10-ounce New York strip ($31) while incinerated Brussels sprouts flat-out detract from an eight-ounce filet ($40). You can still order a side of terminally bland steamed vegetables ($13), painfully oversalted duck-fat fries ($8) or comparatively decent onion rings ($6). But why would you?

There are a few moments when Prime is good. Not at dessert, although to be fair, I never sample the signature chocolate soufflé. No one warns me ahead of time that it takes 30 minutes to prepare. I eat middling pastries instead.

No, the best of Prime is at the very beginning. Steak tartare ($22) is vast and excellent, three mounds of hand-chopped filet boosted by Dijon and gherkins. Supple grilled calamari ($16) is another winner, better than most in the city.

I recently wrote about an $800 dinner for two at Kaiseki Yu-zen Hashimoto. It is worth the money because it is unique and it is perfect. Prime is neither.

One of Pachter’s paintings at Prime shows an extinct Irish elk skeleton with the caption: “So I guess that’s it then.”

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